Creating a passive income for yourself to hopefully replace that one you work 40 hours a week for.
Just think, how great would it be to make money whilst you sleep, wake up the next day to find you’ve made a days wage, if not more.
Affiliate Marketing is a great way to make this happen.
The idea of affiliate marketing means that you promote other peoples products and you earn a commission if someone buys it.
For example, one of best websites I can show you who has made this into a money making machine is
This site offers products that are sold mainly on amazon, they just act as a middle man to send the customers through to there website.
Check out the analytics in ubersuggest and you will be amazed by the amount of traffic they attract.
How you can become an Affiliate Marketer?
Think of a Niche
This can be tricky, but before you think of anything else you need to make sure that chosen a niche that has the following:
- Money in it?
- That it isn’t already massively competitive. For example, health & fitness.
- Is their an audience within this niche large enough for you to scale your service or products to?
- Has a large amount of keywords you can use to write killer blog posts for SEO purposes.
- And, that there are affiliate programs within the niche you are targeting.
The first time I attempted to enter affiliate marketing, I made the mistake of only checking if there was money in it.
This was a massive mistake as I ended up wasting so much time and effort on promoting my site which was already way too competitive, I didn’t stand a chance!
Be sure to take your time when choosing your niche, nothing feels worse than wasting months and months of time on a project that just isn’t going to get you anywhere.
Look into Affiliates you can join
This is where your income will be coming from so be sure to look around and compare. You wouldn’t take the first job that comes along without looking about would you.
There might be one affiliate program that pays 25% commission and another that pays 50% commission. Why not earn more for your hard work.
Take into consideration that some affiliate programs offer recurring monthly commissions, this means that you will earn a commission every month if your customer goes on to purchase/subscribes through your site. Having a few of these can sustain a very generous monthly income.
Some of these affiliate programs you might want to look at are:
- Amazon Affiliates
- eBay Partners
- Clickbank
- ShareAsale Affiliates
- Rakuten Marketing Affilates
These are just a few examples and some of the most popular ones people decide to join.
If you Google whatever your niche is and follow it with affiliates, I’m sure you’ll be able to find some sort of affiliate program.
Purchasing a Domain name
Your domain name is the address for your website, for example: www.yourbusiness.co.uk.
This can take a bit of time as the name that you might have in mind might be already taken.
When selecting a domain name try and keep it short, ending .com,.co.uk, .org or .net, try and make it easy to remember and make sure you’ve spelt it correctly when purchasing.
If your wanting to purchase a domain name, have a look at:
Setup your hosting
Hosting isn’t too expensive, couple of pounds per month, which is incredible when you think about it. To have the potential to showcase your website in front of a worldwide audience, it’s incredible!
Again, you can do this with 123reg.co.uk when you purchase the domain name. A few others would be Go Daddy, Hostgator, Bluehost and many more.
Try and pick someone reputable as you business depends on it.
Build your site
This is what a lot of people would usually find to be daunting, however all you need is WordPress. WordPress is a simple drag and drop system with already made templates, you can then tailor this template to your niche.
If you would like a tutorial to watch just to get a better idea on how to use WordPress, I would recommend watching one of Tyler Moores videos.
Images for your site
If you are going to be using a template or your own design you are going to need images to place on your site so it relates to your niche and looks appealing.
For royalty free images, have a look at:
If you need photos that relate more to your niche I would recommend to look at:
These images you will have to pay for but are defiantly worth the investment if needed.
Create informative and helpful content
Content is king, this is going to be what gets potential customers to your site.
The content you need to think about writing is:
- Reviews on products
- Blog posts that help people with their problems
- Blog posts answering peoples questions –
Quora Is a great place to find out what questions/problems people are asking within your niche.
- Helpful blog posts are considered to be at least minimum of 1500 words, use imagery and sub headers to break up your content so it’s easier for the user to read.
When producing this content you want to target certain keywords. I’m hoping before you got to this stage you would have already made a list of a few keywords that are competitive, just so you know you’re not entering a niche that is too hard to breakthrough.
However, there’s no reason why you can’t create better content that tops some of the big boys.
To find certain keywords within your niche, you can use:
This will provide you with a breakdown and a list of potential keywords you can target and place in your blog posts.
Google itself can provide you with some great information also.
For example, type in your keyword into Google and it will try to predict what you will be referring to, these are a great way to find long tail keywords.
If your ever stuck on keywords, check out:
They are all free.
After this you can then begin to build your audience.
Building your presence on social media
Social media is a powerful tool and one you should be using to your advantage.
Being depended on what your niche is?
Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest can work better for some than others. If your niche was gardening or artwork, Pinterest might be the best for you as it just uses imagery, same with Instagram, not to say Facebook won’t work better.
I’m just trying to make you aware that not all social media platforms may suit your niche, if they don’t, don’t worry, focus on the ones that do and try to make the most of it.
Building a Facebook group is a great way to build an audience and a following.
Imagine having 50,000 people following your page and all you have to do is create a post to promote your services & products, keep in mind that this would all be free aswell, how powerful is that!
If you need more information on building a Facebook group, I would advise to have a look at:
Neil Patel offers multiple strategies which are easy to implement, but they will take time and won’t happen over night. Be patient!
Facebook ad’s can also be implemented in your strategy, this will allow you to create ad’s to people who have showed an interest or work within your niche. Due to this it will allow for a better sales conversion compared to selling to complete strangers.
For more information on Facebook ad’s, Ben Heath on Youtube offers some great advice on how to make the best of your ad’s through Lookalike audiences, retargeting and much more.
Check out here:
Focus on SEO
We touched on this briefly with keywords but SEO is a lot more than just targeting the right keywords. If you looking for longevity, you really need to invest time or money into SEO.
With this your website will always show in the search engines and will always have a reliable source of traffic going to it.
You need to think of on page and off page SEO:
On Page SEO
- Using keywords in the first 150 words of your blog post.
- Use your keyword in H1
- Never use more than one H1 tag in your blog post as it will dilute the importance of it.
- Optimise your images – fill in the alt text describing what it is, Google is really bad at reading images.
- Use external links – Such as Wikipedia to back up your facts. I say Wikipedia because it’s a reliable source of information and will be in no way a competitor.
- Use internal links – Link to your content that you’ve already published.
Off Page SEO
- Link building (Backlinks)
- Trust
- Positive reviews
There’s a lot more I would advise to take into consideration when it comes to SEO, I would recommend to have a look at this SEO Checklist by Brian Dean.
By implementing this strategy, rinsing and repeating with good quality content blog posts, posting on social media on a regular basis and having a determination to succeed, there’s no reason why you won’t be able to create a recurring revenue through affiliate marketing.
Take you time, be patient, work, learn & don’t be scared to fail!